Posted
by
Zonkon Monday October 16, 2006 @01:09PM
from the where-no-journo-has-gone-before dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life, and C|Net is following suit. Both companies are joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet. Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life for real world readers who visit a Reuters news site at: http://secondlife.reuters.com/"

I'm still waiting for the in game Radio Shack salespeople that follow you around for hours while you play asking if they can help you find what you're looking for. I'm sure advertising will go absolutely crazy in the game soon so it's really not that far from possible.

"I'm still waiting for the in game Radio Shack salespeople that follow you around for hours while you play asking if they can help you find what you're looking for"

The same guys that give you the third degree and have you fill out a 3 page form when you try to buy just one battery? I had one of those refuse to sell me something because the fake zip code I gave for the zip code question was not a real code.

For a MMO with such a small playerbase, SL seems to grab a lot of headlines. I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML. On the other hand, SL is still seriously clunky, especially if you make something that's actually popular.

For a MMO with such a small playerbase, SL seems to grab a lot of headlines. I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML. On the other hand, SL is still seriously clunky, especially if you make something that's actually popular.

It also seems to be rather vulnerable to game killing griefing. I tried to start an account but the service was suffering "rolling grid resets" and object spamming all weekend. I just gave up.

That's not how the hype went though. The idea with VRML is that you'd load a page with your VRML enabled browser and insead of looking at a big wall of text and pictures, you would be dropped into a 3D environment that would be better somehow. It was the Net, but in 3D. Secondlife is actually much the same way (you can click on a secondlife:// URL and get dropped into a specific place in the game), but it actually works on hardware that doesn't cost $10,000, so it does have a leg up there. Still, it's a

It is odd the way all the news articles about MMORPGS bang on about SL, when WoW is so much larger. I guess it's easier and more mainstream-acceptable to write about people making a living selling clothes and converting it into USD than writing about the latest guild to down Ragnaros and the latest PvP rankings. Multiple servers don't help there I guess.
I did remember that there was a BBC story once where the correspondant logged in as a dwarf or a gnome and promised to give updates on his progress. Ne

Second Life is more interesting I think because most of what you see in the game is player created. WoW may have more people playing it, but they're spread across a bunch of different servers, and they're generally just interacting with pre-made content. Second Life takes place in a huge online world, where almost everything can be modified by players, and almost everything can be sold/traded/exchanged/given away. It's much more open-ended than WoW.

The downside is that you have a lot of less-talented people creating the world, so much of what you see is crap. But there's still plenty of good stuff, and just because someone isn't that great at creating doesn't mean they shouldn't be given the opportunity to try, or to share what they've made.

There's also almost nothing to do inside the world except buy, create, sell and talk.And most of the stuff you buy / create / sell either aids social interactions (wow! humping avatars!) or pay-for-play gambling.

There's just a whole lot of nothing besides chat and selling non-tangible items for the "cool" factor alone.

That and they allowed their credit card database to be raided and then refused to remove my personal information from their servers until the standard 90-day culling period had passed. Bast

SL is not so much a game as it is a toy. You can chat and roleplay if you want, but you can do that on IRC just about as well, and the IRC client is a lot lighter than SL. Where it really shines is when you start playing around with creating the most artistic and astetically pleasing objects/structures that you can. If you're really good at it, you can make stuff pretty enough to pay off your monthly game fee (or rental costs if you don't want to become a paying member and instead just rent mall space).

I think that 2L isn't nearly enough engrained into the mainstream to deserve all of the hype traditional marketing companies are giving it. There's just not enough of a user-base to support it.

That said, it'll be interesting to see if all of these companies can actually draw users to 2L. Another thing I'm interested to see is whether advertising companies will force Linden Labs to clean up the metaverse. AFAIK there seems to be a lot of 2L that centers around good ol' machinima pr0n.

Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members

Does this seem bleak to anyone else? I don't play SL, but I do get heavily into the games I play, and I don't quite see stuff like "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle. In other news, spinach may kill you, a baseball player just crashed his airplane into a building, and Adam Sandler is working on a hot new romantic comedy. Now, here's Luigi with the latest updates from the Iraq war..." doing wonders for game immersion.

There's not much to worry about there, because there's really no "game" to be immersed in. Since SL is all about social interaction above all else, perhaps having news right there inside the world makes sense...

But then you could just play the game in a window and tab over to a web browser to read C|Net a whole heck of a lot faster.

True you can run it in a window, but SL is very resource intensive. For the 1.10 cleint it would crash a few minuts after I tried to run any other application at the same time That problem doesn't happen with 1.12 but it's slow. So any thing that can give me access to web pages/news/information in-world without having to open up a browser would be appreciated.

Just curious, because we seem to get an awful lot of Second Life stories on slashdot these days, but AFAICS the comments section doesn't support the idea that a large number of people on slashdot actually, y'know... care.

Not trying to have a troll, saying it sucks, or trying to issue some lame diktat that there "shouldn't" be Second Life stories here. I just genuinely wonder if the frequency of SL stories actually tallies with the level of interest/participation in SL amongst/. membership.

Well, here is one vote for regularly.
I have a little business selling things I make and have made at least $250 or so without investing a single dime in the game. I enjoy creating things in world for fun, and making a real, if small, profit is just a bonus.

your on Slashdot - news for...ah you know. Now go read Snowcrash. Now sit and ponder that for a second. SL is the closest thing i have heard of to the metaverse

Yeah, I know I'm on slashdot and therefore a geek and therefore in no position to be bashing a virtual world as lame. Which I why I was careful to say that wasn't my intention. I have read Snowcrash and I know exactly what you mean. "In concept it sounds cool" - that's my opinion too, and yet I've never actually gone and tried it. And given t

Snowcrash, Neuromancer, and other books of the genre are one of the reasons that I play SL.

It has the possibility of growing into far more than it is now. Maybe even of growing into the massive virtual worlds that cyberpunk has used so often. Currently, it is a little clunky and lag happens, but any new technology starts that way (look at the model T). If SL is it, THE BEGINNING, then it will be very interesting to have been there from nearly the start, to have watched it all develop.

I play SL regularly, but I am still surprised by the number of SL stories on Slashdot recently.IIRC the # players was just under 700000 when I joined in July, it's over 800000 now, and at this rate will probably hit a million by late November.

It appeals to a different demographic than WoW. there's a lot of artistic folks, art majors, people who do jewelry or fashion related stuff in real life, 2D and 3D modeling folks. There's no grind or worrying to have to keep up with guildmates level wise so plenty of

Fersure. This subtle advertising of SL piqued my curiousity enough, the other week when I was really frikkin' bored and trying to think of a geek activity I could share with my wiff, I actually installed the client.I toyed about a bit. It was meh. I lost interest after a half-hour and haven't returned. Can't see what value I'd find in it. Wasn't overly entertaining, didn't learn much, didn't see much potential for anything more than simply wasting time.